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Six months ago, quietly and swiftly, Russian air power soared in to rescue Assad, just as the regime was beginning to seriously buckle. An area the size of Connecticut (or two times that of Prince Edward Island) was relentlessly pounded back into Assad’s hands, resetting the table entirely.

Then, just as the Syrian leader began to muse aloud about sidestepping peace talks and instead marching on to retake the whole of Syria in the years to come, Russia declares mission accomplished. Disbelievers shrugged off Monday’s pledge by President Vladimir Putin, opting to wait and see. By Wednesday, the pullout was well underway, with fully half of the Russian air deployment already home.

Putin is full of surprises and this one, it appears, came without warning to Assad and his Shiite Muslim allies, Hezbollah and Iran. A surprise, too, to the Saudis, Turkey and their Sunni Arab proxies. A surprise, even, to Washington.

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The raw facts have since been overlaid with rabid speculation. Did Russia cut a side-deal with Saudi Arabia to turn off its giant spigot and ease the global oil gut, enabling the rise of crude prices to save Moscow’s petro-economy? Is this all part of a grand Putin plan to leverage European angst over Syrian refugees to pressure the EU to accept Russian ambitions in eastern Ukraine?

Or perhaps Russia is wisely consolidating for the short term, harvesting the profits of a changed map for its client in Syria before this year’s other big geopolitical tumblers turn. A dialing down of the Cold War temperature, maybe, as Putin waits and watches (with the rest of us) to see what other sorts of fire Donald Trump intends to play with in the run-up to November’s U.S. election.

Russia’s loudest critics scoff, either way. As Frederic Hof of the Atlantic Council observes, the Russian withdrawal is instantly reversible and in any event is unlikely to persuade Obama’s successor and other Western leaders that Putin is a force for good in the world. “If nothing else, the civilian slaughter he has commissioned in Syria makes it clear what he is and what he stands for,” writes Hof.

Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times, called Russia’s six-month campaign morally “monstrous.” But in the same paragraph, credited Putin with pulling off another coup, showing that “he is a more adept international poker player than his counterpart in Washington.”

It’s easy to forget, but Putin’s surprises aren’t always bad news for Washington. Cast your mind back to the late summer of 2013, when an accidental slip of the tongue — Barack Obama’s declaration of a red line in Syria over chemical weapons — came back to haunt the White House, bringing the country to the precipice of war.

Two tension-filled weeks of tub-thumping for U.S.-led airstrikes rose to a crescendo, with Britain first joining — and then dramatically unjoining — the cause, when Prime Minister David Cameron lost his own party’s support amid what his crestfallen defence minister called “a deep well of suspicion about involvement in the Middle East.”

Nothing speaks more loudly than war when it comes to highlighting differences between Moscow and Washington. Putin never asks permission. Obama — then facing polls showing barely one in five Americans supporting the call for military action — found himself with no political wiggle room whatsoever. As the moment of decision approached, Obama appeared headed for a humiliation similar to Cameron’s, announcing he would freeze U.S. warships in place and instead seek approval from a war-shy Congress.

Instead, it was Moscow that came adroitly to the rescue, parlaying a throwaway quote from Secretary of State John Kerry into a rapid diplomatic breakthrough. Assad would surrender his WMDs to avert U.S. airstrikes.

And so here we are again, with Kerry readying for key meetings in Moscow. Another chance, possibly a strong one, to steer the Syrian standoff toward meaningful peace talks. And Putin, again, holding the cards that matter.

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